ESSAYS

Rethinking Love, Life, Divorce, and What Makes a Happy Family.

In 2009, I wrote an essay for Slate’s Double X site about my “surprise” planned pregnancy, which came about shortly after I got engaged. Six years later, I wrote the bookend piece about the end of my marriage, which ran in the New York Times Modern Love column. The column became an episode of the Modern Love podcast, with the actress Molly Ringwald reading the essay followed by an interview with me.

In the first essay, I was struggling with how to make a family. In the second essay, I was struggling how to remake that family—which now included a second child—after the pain and trauma of divorce.

Since then, I have continued to write personal essays about how to have a “good divorce,” how to exist in the world as a part time mom of two young children, and the outside-the-box parenting methods I have turned to as a single parent.

There’s a saying that if pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters. But how would the story begin? Whether planned or unplanned, I think it’s fair to say that the realization of every pregnancy starts with a sense of shock and awe.

Lara Bazelon is a law professor, author, and contributing writer for Slate. Her op-eds and essays have also been published in the New York Times,Washington Post, and Politico, among other media outlets. Her book, Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction, will be published in the fall of 2018.